Sarkeesian’s “You Suck” Statement At The UN Was Not What Anti-SJWs Claim

sarkeesian-un-quote

So Zoe Quinn and Anita Sarkeesian, among others, were witnesses at the launch of the UN’s “Working Group on Broadband and Gender.”1

Ever since, right-wingers on social media have been claiming that Sarkeesian said that “you suck” is a form of cyberviolence, or that Sarkeesian said that people should be put in jail for saying “you suck,” etcetra. (Related: The 13 Most Ridiculous Things #GamerGaters Have Said About Anita and Zoe’s UN Visit (Reddit Edition) | we hunted the mammoth).

My friend Cathy Young’s statement is a typical example of the genre, milder than many, but notable because it comes from a respected anti-SJW writer.

cathy-young-sarkeesian

FWIW I think some are too dismissive of threats to Sarkeesian. But when she tells UN being told “You suck” on the Internet is a form of “cyberviolence” that should be a cause of public concern, “professional victim” is not too harsh a label IMO.

I had to go searching for Sarkeesian’s actual statement, since – rather conveniently – not a single one of the many, many right-wingers who criticized the statement (that I read) either quoted it in full or linked to it. Here it is:

I have been the target for 3 years nonstop of egregious online harassment in all levels. I think it’s important to recognize that harassment is, as someone had mentioned, it’s not just what is legal and illegal, right? Harassment is threats of violence, but it’s also the day to day grind of “you’re a liar,” “you suck,” making all these hate videos to attack us on a regular basis, and the mobs that come from those hate videos, etcetra.

Sarkeesian’s actual statement said that there are “levels” of harassment, explicitly distinguished between “violence” and “you suck” statements, and said that relatively mild abusive remarks, when they become a “day to day grind,” can be a form of harassment. This is all the polar opposite of what Cathy attributed to her – and, incidentally, so reasonable that it’s almost banal.

Anyhow, I’m posting this here so I have something to point to this week, since I suspect I’m going to see this lie continue to come up a lot.

P.S. By the way, I haven’t read it, but Jesse Singal convincingly argues that The U.N.’s Cyberharassment Report Is Really Bad. “Bad” as in poorly conceived, argued, and written. If that’s so, then that’s sad – what a wasted opportunity.

P.P.S. Cathy responds to me on Twitter, in the replies to this tweet. I don’t think her defense is convincing.

  1. You can watch Sarkeesian’s statement here; her bit begins 90 minutes into the video. Quinn is the speaker before Sarkeesian. []
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89 Responses to Sarkeesian’s “You Suck” Statement At The UN Was Not What Anti-SJWs Claim

  1. 1
    Copyleft says:

    But the day-to-day grind of being publicly disagreed with really isn’t harassment, at any level at all. Threats are (or would be, if any had actually been made) harassment. Criticism and insults? Not even close.

  2. 2
    LTL FTC says:

    It’s up to you how charitably to interpret her statement, but it looks like the larger UN treatment of the issue is some stinking hot garbage. It turns out that you can get the western left to do the bidding of the authoritarian right (penalties against blasphemy specifically) if you say the right magic words.

    From Popehat on UN Cyberviolence report:

    Why would you call something “violence,” when it’s not violent? Usually it’s to co-opt the legal and social norms associated with violence. It’s like when you re-define “terrorism” so broadly that you can use the resources and power of the anti-terrorism fight to, say, police DVD piracy.

    I want to post that quote every time I read a “your words are violence-ing me!” post elsewhere online. It’s a trope that needs to die.

  3. 3
    Grace Annam says:

    Copyleft:

    But the day-to-day grind of being publicly disagreed with really isn’t harassment, at any level at all.

    This seems strangely categorical, to me. Certainly the word “harassment”, as commonly used, includes the notion of repeated small annoyances which would be individually trivial. In my jurisdiction, the crime of harassment can include a situation involving repeated unwanted telephone calls. It seems to me that “harassment” certainly has, or can have, a “death by a thousand cuts” connotation.

    And it’s well known that persistent harassment can constitute bullying. If the price of public participation is that you have to experience routine vilification, that certainly creates a disincentive to public discourse, a price-to-be-paid which is certainly charged unequally to different people, and on average, to members of different groups.

    At some point, if you put enough of one thing together, they sum to a qualitatively different thing. That’s why we don’t call a few drops of rain “getting soaked”, or walking across a quarter-inch-deep puddle “wading” or “swimming”.

    I often suspect that people who casually dismiss the level of abuse which others experience can’t understand it because they’ve never had their strength sapped in that way.

    Also, re-reading your post, I see that we’re talking about two different things. I’m talking about “the day to day grind of ‘you’re a liar,’ ‘you suck,’ making all these hate videos to attack us on a regular basis, and the mobs that come from those hate video, etcetra”. Somehow you’ve converted that into “being publicly disagreed with”. But that’s like characterizing a spit in the eye as spirited debate. They are different things.

    Grace

  4. 4
    Kai Jones says:

    I am not ground down by being disagreed with. I am sometimes ground down by the tone of disagreement–by the personal insults that have nothing to do with disagreeing with what I’m writing or saying.

    On the other hand, I’ve tried to follow Heinlein’s dictum: “An insult is like a drink: it only affects one if accepted.”

    On the gripping hand, it’s depressing finding out how unpleasant so many people are, that they resort to personal insults instead of countering arguments.

  5. 5
    veronica d says:

    First we should try to honestly appreciate what people such as Sarkeesian go through. Next we decide if that should count as “harassment.”

    Not everyone will agree, of course. But if you’re position is “Oh that’s not harassment” — well people will form opinions of you, along with your capacity for empathy and judgment.

  6. 6
    Pesho says:

    Well, if saying that “You suck” were harassment (which by the way is at least a misdemeanor, and can be a felony) then if I ever have to interact with any of Zoe Quinn, Anita Sarkeesian and Cathy Young’s ilk, I would be very temped to engage in harassment.

    So, I approve of people being mocked for saying that expressing disapproval is harassment. I would also prefer that they be mocked without their words being misreported, twisted, or quoted out of context.

    Why?

    Because here I see Ampersand, whose heart I think is in the right place, defending a person whom I consider a dishonest manipulator and a document that is amazingly flawed, even for a UN report on a politically charged subject.

    I like to think that he would not be attacking Anita Sarkeesian critics if they had not been dishonest on their own.

    —–

    By the way, are English irrealis moods really clumsy and limited, or am I really, really bad at using them? I assure you, the above would be way less cumbersome in most other languages I know.

  7. 7
    LTL FTC says:

    It seems to me like a classic case of tone policing.

    “You can disagree with me, but if you do so with any degree of hyperbole or charged language, or if you veer into generic insults to express your disgust with what I’m doing, you’re wrong,” certainly wouldn’t be accepted from someone criticizing BLM’s tactics.

    Why doesn’t someone just come out and say it: there are certain communities in which the preferred standards of behavior are neither viewpoint neutral or Oppression Olympics neutral, and members of those communities are seeking to codify that into law. If you’re going to interact with someone who holds the correct progressive views and/or ranks higher on the OO medal count, the kid gloves have to come out.

    OTOH, if you’re on the right side, be as vituperative, ad-homenim and nasty as you want – as long as “we” get to decide what constitutes the right side, of course.

  8. 8
    Ampersand says:

    It’s weird how incapable anti-SJW people are of actually parsing Sarkeesian’s words correctly.

    Pesho, nothing in her statement says saying “You suck,” in and of itself, is “harassment.” If you think otherwise, you didn’t read her words correctly.

    LTC, “You can disagree with me, but if you do so with any degree of hyperbole or charged language, or if you veer into generic insults to express your disgust with what I’m doing, you’re wrong” is not a reasonable parse of what Sarkeesian said, at all.

  9. 9
    Ben Lehman says:

    Pesho: Amp isn’t defending the report, that I can see. He explicitly says he hasn’t read it but links positively to someone who thinks it’s very bad.

  10. 10
    Ampersand says:

    Well, if saying that “You suck” were harassment (which by the way is at least a misdemeanor, and can be a felony) then if I ever have to interact with any of Zoe Quinn, Anita Sarkeesian and Cathy Young’s ilk, I would be very temped to engage in harassment.

    It’s funny that you consider ZQ, AS and Cathy to be of the same “ilk.” I really doubt that Cathy sees herself as having much in common with the other two. (And vice versa.)

    And no one here, nor in the Sarkeesian quote, is claiming that saying “You suck,” in and of itself, is harassment. That’s a straw man.

    Because here I see Ampersand, whose heart I think is in the right place, defending a person whom I consider a dishonest manipulator and a document that is amazingly flawed, even for a UN report on a politically charged subject.

    This makes it seem that you didn’t bother reading my post before responding to it. Literally the only mention I made of the UN report, was an approving link to Jesse Singal’s article which says the report is terrible.

    Sarkeesian seems like a perfectly ordinary feminist media critic to me; I don’t doubt that she’s made the occasional one-sided argument, as does everyone who writes about political or aesthetic issues, but she’s simply not the eeevvviiiillll demon that many anti-SJWs portray her as.

    By the way, are English irrealis moods really clumsy and limited, or am I really, really bad at using them? I assure you, the above would be way less cumbersome in most other languages I know.

    English irrealis moods are really clumsy and limited.

  11. 11
    LTL FTC says:

    Amp, I have to disagree with you here. The statement at issue says “harassment is,” and then has a list.

    That list is “Threats of violence” and “Day to day grind,” which contains a sub-list of things, including critics saying “you suck” and “you’re a liar,” videos and mobs that come from those videos.

    Not really any gradations here, just defining harassment as two kinds of things, the second of which, in part, looks like nonviolent but intemperate criticism, or “generic insults to express your disgust.”

    The less-charitable (but I believe valid) interpretation is that the intemperate criticism is itself harassment if it is voluminous enough.

    If you’re as charitable as possible with her words, you could say that the first four items on the list (two sets of bad words, videos) lead to the fourth (mobs), which, by their nature, are violent and dangerous. But that’s a stretch, and it undermines the statement that it’s the grind itself that constitutes harassment.

    OK, That was a little pedantic. And Sarkeesian doesn’t deserve 5% of what she’s been subjected to, even if you disagree with her conclusions. For the record, I agree with most, but not all. I’m not even a gamer, so I can’t even interpret it as some sort of PC threat to my hobby. What I’m up in arms about is the creeping trend towards criminalization without a thought for unintended consequences.

    Empowering the state (or a global entity like the UN) to determine the acceptable tone used towards certain subgroups is a recipe for unintended consequences. Today’s it’s protecting Sarkeesian from being told she’s a liar (or being told that too much). Tomorrow, it’s protecting imams or priests from criticism of their attacks on gay people. To think this kind of logic won’t be used against people you like is a failure of imagination.

  12. 12
    LTL FTC says:

    To clarify (and wonder where my edit button went so fast), those “levels” in the previous sentence are not used to distinguish between what ought and ought not be criminalized, which is why we’re talking about it at all.

  13. 13
    Ampersand says:

    Well, if saying that “You suck” were harassment (which by the way is at least a misdemeanor, and can be a felony)

    Oh, wanted to comment on this as well. Contrary to what you suggest, not all forms of harassment are illegal. Sarkeesian’s statement seems to acknowledge this, saying that harassment is “not just what is legal and illegal.”

  14. 14
    Christopher says:

    Harassment is threats of violence, but it’s also the day to day grind of “you’re a liar,” “you suck,” making all these hate videos to attack us on a regular basis, and the mobs that come from those hate videos, etcetra.

    The one question I have is where this leaves all the left-wing people who use those same tactics.

    I mean, inflicting people with “the day to day grind” of prominent talking heads making videos about why somebody sucks and then implicitly or explicitly encouraging their commenters to confront those people with their suckiness is not just something that left wing groups do, it’s a tactic for creating social change.

    Isn’t that pretty much what got Brandon Eich to step down as Mozilla CEO?

    Remember that Jonathan Chait article about Political Correctness? Almost all of his examples were people who felt drained by that “day to day grind” Sarkeesian mentions, and they got NO sympathy from people on the left.

    Instead, they were told that it was ridiculous hyperbole to call that grind “harassment”, that it was just a desire on their part to escape from criticism, that, hey, this is how ideas are debated and if you can’t stand the heat stay out of the kitchen.

    (A small amount of Chait’s article focused on the other kind of harassment, the kind where people vandalize your apartment, but that just drew complete silence as far as I could tell.)

    The sort of thing Sarkeesian calls “harassment” here turns into valid debate when it’s deployed against people we don’t like.

    And BTW, the anti-PC crowd generally act the same way, where the line between “debate” and “harassment” is drawn based on how much they like the person being criticised.

  15. 15
    Pesho says:

    Ampersand, I think I am pretty good at parsing. She claims that an endless stream of “You Suck”, hate videos, insults, etc… is harassment.

    Now, years ago, my teachers claimed that “Quantitative accumulation results in qualitative change”. They had a point, despite being Commies.

    And yeah, the effects of that part of what she is experiencing is indistinguishable of the effects of harassment. But the people who are doing it are not harassing her.

    She has, on at least one occasion, fabricated threats against herself. She has, at least once, used knowingly wrong statements on a very popular forum, to deliberately provoke a hostile response.

    There are a ton of things that are happening to her that are the result of illegal actions and should be investigated… if the resources allow it, of course. I assume that when the resources allow it, every time someone threatens to trace my IP and beat me for sticking a javelin in his back in Mount and Blade, it will be investigated.

    But the “You suck”, and the hate videos, and the “You liar!” are just the normal response to her ignorant statements, her deliberate deceptions, etc… The volume is due to her exposure, which she has sought. Plenty of other trolls get plenty of threats. She trolled a softer and dumber target – gamers, so she is getting an immense amount of hate. I’ve never bother replying to anything of hers. If I had thought that my reply would have gotten through the inevitable stream of invective, I would have and my reply would not have been just invective.

    Well, she made a career out of it. She would not have been testifying in front of the UN if all she had working for her was the depth of her journalistic research, her knowledge of the field on which she chose to write, or the respect she showed for forum rules.

    But the unending stream is by people who are mostly just disagreeing with her, or rather have been successfully trolled. Some may be harassing her, and some definitely need to be punished for their threats, but most are not.

  16. 16
    Copyleft says:

    No, Sarkeesian is not saying that all forms of harassment are illegal. She is, however, saying that anything that makes her feel unhappy should be considered ‘harassment.’ You seem to be parsing her incorrectly.

  17. 17
    Pesho says:

    As for putting Cathy with the other two, didn’t I say why? They all push agendas which are more or less reasonable, in the sense that people can agree with them without my immediately dismissing them as morons. None are above twisting words and facts, in my opinion knowingly, and they all make a living from it. They will also trample over people who have done them nothing wrong in the pursuit of scoring points. If Cathy is your friend, then you are probably asking when she did this. I am honestly quite sure, but I am sure that one of the posts you had linked had implications which I considered horrible. I cannot remember exactly what it was, but it left a really bad taste in my mouth.

    And yeah, I know that my stuff is often not quite robust, either, as evidenced by my deciding that you were defending the UN abomination. I seem to think that you wrote somewhere that it was a good initiative or a step forward, or something. And we had discussed it at our Saturday party before you wrote about it (or rather before I decided it was you who wrote it)

    But I make no living off it, I just trawl blog sites full of people who can think, so I have better ammo in my arguments with my friends.

  18. 18
    Ampersand says:

    She is, however, saying that anything that makes her feel unhappy should be considered ‘harassment.’

    Please quote the exact words where she says that.

  19. 19
    Pete Patriot says:

    So Zoe Quinn and Anita Sarkeesian, among others, were witnesses at the launch of the UN’s “Working Group on Broadband and Gender.”

    No. They were discussants at the release of a report on cyberviolence. They were given the report, a preprepared question, and asked to discuss. That’s why people think Sark’s comments relate to her views on cyberviolence, discussing cyberviolence is what most people would do in that situation. The other alternative is that after being asked to discuss cyberviolence at the UN, Sark went off on a tangent and didn’t give even a basic response to the question she was asked. I think that’s actually very plausible, but don’t blame anyone who thinks she gave a straight answer.

  20. 20
    Ampersand says:

    Christopher,

    I’d quibble with your examples. In Eich’s case, his resignation was driven mostly by criticism by other Mozilla employees, and whether or not he was an acceptable leader to his co-workers had an direct and obvious bearing on his ability to be CEO. That seems significantly different from the harassment Sarkeesian or (for example) Memories Pizza has been subjected to.

    I think you’re significantly misstating the criticism of Chait in your eagerness to make a “both sides do it!” argument. The Chait article in question doesn’t even use the word “harassment”[*] – his point was about free speech, not harassment – so it’s very unlikely that many critics of Chait made the argument you attribute to them.

    Memories Pizza in Indiana would have been a much better example for your “both sides do it!” argument, imo. (BTW, just this week a gay couple mischievously served Memories Pizza at their wedding. That’s a sort of response I think is lovely.)

    Specific examples aside, I agree that individually inoffensive (or only mildly offensive) comments can in total be a horrible experience, and even harassment, when they come in a torrent. And that’s true regardless of if it’s left or right.

    it’s a tactic for creating social change.

    I actually feel the same way about this, as I do about boycotts. As I’ve often said, boycotts are a powerful tool; they can be valuable, but they can also be harmful when misapplied. There is no global “boycotts are bad!” or “boycotts are good!” rule; we have to look at context. Is the target a reasonable target of a boycott? Is there a specific polity change being sought, or is the boycott merely vindictive? Is responding this way to [whatever] a proportional response? I think these are the sort of questions we have to ask about bringing social media pressure to bear to create change, rather than having a one-size-fits-all answer.

    (One complicating factor with the “boycott” comparison: Unlike a formal boycott, a social media storm can happen spontaneously, rather than in a planned fashion.)

    Last week, a pharmaceutical company raised prices on a drug by such a large percentage that it lead to an enormous social backlash, including an enormous social media firestorm. The company eventually decided to lower the price (although to what extent, remains to be seen). That would be an example, imo, of a valuable social media backlash. The Memories Pizza thing, otoh, seems to me to be “bad backlash.” And ditto, of course, what’s happened to Sarkeesian.

    [*] Chait did use the phrase “sexual harassment” once, but not to suggest that people on the left were committing harassment.

  21. 21
    Helios says:

    “Please quote the exact words where she says that.”

    What a dick. I mean, I can’t come up with anything more mature than that in the face of someone who will crawl over cut glass to defend a nasty woman and throw any and all men under the bus. At every opportunity. Jesus Christ.

  22. 22
    Ampersand says:

    She has, on at least one occasion, fabricated threats against herself.

    Is there a supporting link you can provide, to a reasonable and objective source, to prove this claim?

  23. 23
    Ampersand says:

    They were given the report, a preprepared question, and asked to discuss.

    Pete, what’s the source for them being given the report in advance? I’m not doubting you, I was just wondering earlier today if they had read the report in advance or not. (The report sounds like it was so slipshod, I wouldn’t be shocked if it turned out that it was completed at the last possible moment.)

    Also, do you have an exact source on what they were asked ahead of time? My impression from having watched their comments is that they were told to prepare a statement about their own experience of online harassment, and (in Quinn’s case) about her anti-harassment organization. But I don’t have any actual knowledge of what they were told in advance; that’s just what it seemed like, from what they said.

  24. 24
    Ampersand says:

    Thanks for your opinion, Helios. I’ll be sure to take that into consideration!

    I have it on good authority that there are a lot of people out there waiting to be called dicks, so I’m betting your schedule is really full, and you won’t have time to post on “Alas” again from now on.

  25. 25
    desipis says:

    Sarkeesian also said:

    “The online social media sites and the places in which we are engaging really need to step up and change the way that their systems operate,” Sarkeesian said during the panel discussion. “It’s not enough that [social media sites] simply put band-aids on the problem areas. They need to completely reimagine what their systems look like in order to build sites that actively deter online harassment.”

    “We need to create an online environment where everyone can participate without fear of intimidation or violence,” she told us. Finally, the [Broadband Commission Working Group on Gender] aims to develop laws and other governance to “enforce compliance and punitive consequences for perpetrators.”

    You can also watch the video here, Sarkeesian’s short statement starts about the 1:30:00 mark.

    I ran through some numbers on the “day to day grind” aspect of harassment which I thought were interesting. Sarkessian claims she’s been the subject of harassment for 3 years, which is roughly 1,000 days. On the other-side looking at the KotakuInAction subreddit, a forum which holds a significantly negative view of Sarkessian, has been growing steadily over the last year and now there are roughly 50,000 subscribers. If each of those subscribers had, at one point over the last 3 years, decided to tweet “you suck” at Sarkeesian, she would have been facing 50 “you suck” comments every day.

    I can see how this could meet the concept of “Quantitative accumulation results in qualitative change” mentioned by Pesho, and hence feel the same as harassment. But at what point do “you suck” comments turn into “harassment”? Would any of those individual hypothetical comments constitute harassment? At what point does it become acceptable to suppress the speech of the subsequent individual commenters?

    Given Sarkeesian’s use of the terms “hate videos” and “mobs” it’s clear that she doesn’t hold much respect for the speech of those who argue against her, and on that basis I don’t think it’s unreasonable to presume that the “laws” and “reimagined” systems that she is anticipating would be at least somewhat draconian.

  26. 26
    Ampersand says:

    Given Sarkeesian’s use of the terms “hate videos” and “mobs” it’s clear that she doesn’t hold much respect for the speech of those who argue against her…

    Would you say the same thing about people who complain about “feminist lynch mobs” and “SJW lynch mobs” or the like?

  27. 27
    Pesho says:

    Is there a supporting link you can provide, to a reasonable and objective source, to prove this claim?

    At same time she posted the last video of hers that I did her the honor of watching, she also posted two screen captures that were supposedly showing death threats and a snippet from a conversation with a police officer (dispatch).

    The conversation with the police officer was unconvincing. My guess would be fake, but did not bother looking into it. (But I just did a search right now, and see that people have done Freedom of Information requests, and the police department that should have handled the call denies any such call.) It is possible that Anita went directly to the FBI, which is the explanation her supporters advance. I guess my experience with local law enforcement has been too positive. Anita must have had good reasons to reach to the FBI local office in a life and death situation, rather than calling 911. Although, considering the idiotic response she cited, I understand why she nowadays prefers the UN.

    But this is something I know now, not then.

    At the time, I looked at the supposed screen capture. It showed a dozen of threats right out of a Twilight novel, starting with compliments about her beauty and attractiveness, and degenerating into threats of vampirism and cannibalism, necrophilia, etc… also listing, supposedly her real address. The tweets had perfect spelling, punctuation, and fit perfectly within the message limit. They were issued within ten minutes, from an account that was created for the purpose, and deleted immediately afterwards. Clearly an obsessed stalker, posting after preparation, and definitely not in the heat of the moment.

    Somehow, Anita managed to capture every single message, no more than 13 seconds after the last message. The screen capture was made after the active user had logged out, with no artifacts from a performed search. Clearing that data would have disturbed that perfect screen capture.

    Can you advance any plausible scenario how Anita would have managed this? I am willing to assume that there is a disturbed person who will write this before hand, and who would prepare a script to fire it out. I am willing to believe that she (it’s a female fantasy, not a male one, so I use a female pronoun) would know Anita’s address. But how did Anita learn about the tweets in time to capture them so quickly and flawlessly, in the short time the account existed?

    I cannot think of any explanation that would not include prior contact with the account owner, which would have by now resulted in an arrest. I just did a brief search. I see many people asking similar (and better questions) about that screen capture. I see no answers. Do you need a link to the capture, so you can look at it for yourself? Or to the people who have bothered posting about it? I would appreciate any explanation for the things that make me think ‘Fake!’

  28. 28
    desipis says:

    Ampersand (quoting me):

    Given Sarkeesian’s use of the terms “hate videos” and “mobs” it’s clear that she doesn’t hold much respect for the speech of those who argue against her…

    Would you say the same thing about people who complain about “feminist lynch mobs” and “SJW lynch mobs” or the like?

    If they were used to frame the discussion about internet laws and regulation, then sure. If they were used to try to get people to reconsider the morality of their own actions, then not so much.

  29. 29
    Ampersand says:

    Sarkeesian said:

    The online social media sites and the places in which we are engaging and these large platforms really need to step up and change the way that their systems operate. So it’s not enough that [social media sites] simply put band-aids on the problem areas. They need to completely reimagine what their systems look like in order to build sites that actively deter online harassment, that make it harder to do this. We’re not going to go and convince every single person who does horrible things online to stop doing those things, but we can make systems that actively deter that kind of behavior.

    This doesn’t sound like a call for new laws to me; it sounds like a call for Twitter and other large platforms to develop better tools to make unwelcome large-scale harassment harder. I don’t know what such tools would be or how they would work – is there a mathematical pattern that would enable Twitter to automatically recognize so-called “twitter mobs” as they’re being started? – but I’m not going to dismiss the very idea out of hand.

    Desipis, you quoted Sarkeesian, but then your blockquote went on to quote the words of the UN report, which was not written by Sarkeesian. (This bit: “aims to develop laws and other governance to “enforce compliance and punitive consequences for perpetrators.””) Then you said:

    and on that basis I don’t think it’s unreasonable to presume that the “laws” and “reimagined” systems that she is anticipating would be at least somewhat draconian.

    You put “laws” in quote as if the word was something “[Sarkeesian] is anticipating,” but in fact, she didn’t talk about new laws, unless I missed something; “laws” was from the report, not from Sarkeesian’s statement.

  30. 30
    desipis says:

    Ampersand, if you watch the video, you’ll see she mentions both “tech platforms” and “laws” towards the end of her statement.

  31. 31
    desipis says:

    Pesho, I assume you’re referring to the screen shot in this tweet.

    While I agree that your explanation is consistent with the screenshot, I don’t think the screenshot in anyway proves your explanation.

    The most significant factor that counts against the “faked harassment” theory is one of motive. There’s plenty of evidence of those sorts of threats happening more generally on the internet. Given both Sarkeesian’s prominence and the controversial nature of her politics, I don’t doubt that she would have been subject to at least some level of threats and harassment. What motive would she have to make up fake threats if she was receiving genuine ones?

    The other significant factor is that the “coincidence arugment” isn’t all that convincing and contains a number of dubious assumptions:

    Somehow, Anita managed to capture every single message, no more than 13 seconds after the last message.

    How do we know that the last message captured as the last message? If this was the work of some obsessed person(s), the messages could have gone on for another 10 minutes. Given the account was deleted, there’s no way to know the total number of messages sent. The timing simply indicates that the screenshot was taken at the time the messages were coming in.

    Clearing that data would have disturbed that perfect screen capture.

    If I was dealing with online harassment of that kind I would be taking precautionary steps, like using incognito mode/private browsing to take screenshots of public web pages, to avoid unintentionally revealing private information. This would have the effect seen. The screenshot may have also have been taken from a computer that Sarkessian didn’t regularly use for twitter, and just happened to be near when she noticed the tweets from her phone. I don’t seen anything suspicious in the fact the screenshot was from a logged out page.

    But how did Anita learn about the tweets in time to capture them so quickly and flawlessly, in the short time the account existed?

    You’re assuming these were the only threatening tweets she received. If she is receiving regular threats, the over any particular period of time it would be likely that some threats would be received. It’s possible she was just monitoring her account over a certain period of time (minutes/hours) until such a threat was received and decided to take the screenshot when she saw the first tweet or two and concluded they were noteworthy.

  32. 32
    Ampersand says:

    Pesho:

    1. I don’t want “Alas” to be a place for people to spread the misogynistic conspiracy theories about Sarkeesian. It’s boring and it’s vile. So you’re banned from this thread, and from any further discussion of Anita Sarkeesian on this blog, ever.

    2. So was this death threat, received by a writer in retaliation for him writing about the Sarkeesian death threat, also a fake? How deep does the conspiracy go?

    3:

    But I just did a search right now, and see that people have done Freedom of Information requests, and the police department that should have handled the call denies any such call.

    Clearly you didn’t search very hard – here’s a link to a news story I found in the first page of google results.

    The FBI is investigating threats directed at Anita Sarkeesian, creator of the Tropes vs. Women series from Feminist Frequency, a spokesperson from the San Francisco Police Department has confirmed to Polygon.

    On August 27, Sarkeesian wrote on Twitter that she had contacted the police after receiving threats directed at both her and her family. She later tweeted a picture of threats directed at them. On September 11, a Breitbart writer published on twitter an email he had received from San Francisco Police Department spokesperson Albie Esparza about whether Sarkeesian had filed a police report. Esparza responded, saying he was unable to find information about it. However, one day later the writer tweeted a correction, saying he had heard back from the police department and that Esparza said the FBI is handling the case. Esparza has confirmed the same to Polygon.

    Esparza said Sarkeesian filed a report with the SFPD, who then passed the information on to the FBI, who is now the primary agency investigating the claims. The FBI stated in accordance with its policy, it neither confirms nor denies any investigation.

    4:

    Regarding Sarkeesian’s amazing feat of hitting the “print screen” button right after reading a threat – does it take you over 12 seconds to hit a button? – there are many possible explanations. From RationalWiki:

    Claim: “The death threats against Anita Sarkeesian are cleary fake, and most likely made by Anita herself,” —Return of Kings[claim 4]
    Rebuttal
    This argument is based solely on several “odd” things in a screencapture Sarkeesian took of the doxxing.

    “Screencap [was] taken only 12 seconds after last post.”

    The “12 second” tweet was the last in a line of 10 tweets, of which the first had been three minutes prior. If someone were to have clicked through to the account from one of those tweets, then that 12s tweet would still be there, and a new tweet might have been posted right after the image was taken. It should also be noted that Twitter timestamps aren’t up-to-date by the second, but update every few minutes. Further, time is utterly meaningless due to Twitter allowing a live search.

    “Anita [was] logged out.”

    Consider the simplicity of non-false-flag yet logged-out scenarios: Sarkeesian could have (a) forgotten to log in (totally never happens), (b) not wanted to be logged in while browsing mean tweets (yes, this is a common thing people do), (c) logged out before realizing that someone was being a shithead, or (d) had a lengthy block list and would rather log out than unblock people to see the tweets.

    “[The tweets were found] without performing any search.”

    There’s a simple explanation for this. Open up Twitter in Firefox. Do a search. Middle-mouse click or ctrl+click on a date, as if you were opening several tweets in succession. Look at the search bar.

    “Perfect capitalization, spelling, and punctuation.”

    … Because nobody can do that.

    It may seem unlikely that even someone who spends huge amounts of time on Twitter will happen to be online just as she gets a death threat – but “unlikely” is not “impossible.” I’ve been online at the very moment (less extreme) hateful comments addressed at me have popped up on “Alas”; if it can happen to me, why couldn’t it happen to someone else? And it becomes a LOT less unlikely when you consider that Sarkeesian gets way more death threats (as well as other forms of abuse) than almost anyone.

  33. 33
    Ampersand says:

    1. I don’t want “Alas” to be a place for people to spread the misogynistic conspiracy theories about Sarkeesian. It’s boring and it’s vile. So you’re banned from this thread, and from any further discussion of Anita Sarkeesian on this blog, ever.

    Okay, I’ve somewhat rethought this. You’re not banned from discussing Sarkeesian, or from this thread. But… please don’t post any more wild theories or speculation about her. The reason people make up this garbage about her isn’t that she’s to blame; it’s that the people making up and spreading the garbage are doing something wrong.

  34. 34
    ianmorris says:

    i read the Jesse Singal link, seems like the UN-report points in the right direction but is kind of unfocused and could be better. hopefully something better written will come from this.

  35. 35
    Pete Patriot says:

    It’s all there if you watch the video. The format is Nidhi Tandon presents the report (which she says she wont spend much time on as its already available) the discussants then address preprepared questions relating to it (which she says were shared in advance at 1:09:35). The responses absolutely relate (or should relate) to the report, it you just skip to the Quinn/Sark replies you miss the context.

    My impression from having watched their comments is that they were told to prepare a statement about their own experience of online harassment, and (in Quinn’s case) about her anti-harassment organization.

    The questions are in the video. You can literally see Tandon reading them out from her notes.

    Sark.

    With your work through feminist frequency how do you interpret a multilevel approach to working on these issues [i.e. cyberviolence]?

    Quinn.

    In your personal and work environment what have you witnessed as being most effective in addressing this kind of violence against women

  36. 36
    RonF says:

    I’m not going to take the time to delve into the immediate subject here. But my first reaction to the report itself is in accordance with LTL FTC’s quotation from Popehat. The concept of describing being the subject of insulting or hostile tweets, e-mails, etc. as “Cyberviolence” is absurd. It’s not violence. Tell the 50+ people who got shot at in Chicago this last weekend that what this woman went through is analogous to violence. Not even close. As long as someone tries to cloak themselves with the idea that somehow being involved in something like this is analogous to being the victim of violence, I can’t take them seriously.

  37. 37
    RonF says:

    Upon reflection, and to refer to the examples given above – I’m not intending to belittle actual threats of violence. Those are (and should be) legally actionable. But even they are not violence in and of themselves. And while having your inbox and Twitter feed fill up with “you suck” is a PITA, I don’t see it as anything that justifies encroaching on the First Amendment.

  38. 38
    LTL FTC says:

    RonF:

    Violence is a valence issue, or an issue on which people can generally agree what constitutes the good result. Things like public safety and clean water are valence issues.

    You’re never so much “con” on those issues per se as you value them more or less compared to competing values or goals. That’s why you’ll never see conservatives coming out against clean water directly, instead saying that this or that regulation is too expensive or won’t do what it claims to or is too intrusive. To say that they actually want dirty water is a strawman. All things being equal, clean water is always better.

    The ability of as many people with a range of views to say as much as they want on public online forums is not a valence issue.

    That makes it a great candidate for this tactic. Re-define whatever you want as a subset of a valence issue. Therefore, disparaging speech is violence. You can be in favor of telling someone she’s a liar if you think she’s lying, but how could you be for violence?

  39. 39
    veronica d says:

    @RonF — But you are now bring up one kind of violence, a gunshot wound, and treating it as representative of all violence. A simple bop on the nose by a passing jerk is also, strictly speaking, violence. However, its significance pales in comparison to most gunshot wounds.

    I suspect what Sarkeesian and Quinn have gone through is far worse than a simple bop on the nose by a passing jerk. (And in case you are wondering, yes I’ve punched in the nose by strangers before.)

    The point is, your argument is bad. The scale of violence can vary. What these women have experienced is certainly within that scale.

    Plus, you know, semantic arguments are ways to dodge talking about what actually happens. Most people are able to listen to these women and imagine the scale of abuse they’ve faced.

  40. 40
    LTL FTC says:

    @veronica d:

    Point missed.

    A bop on the nose and a gunshot would may both be violence, but being told “you suck” is neither a bop on the nose nor a gunshot wound nor any other kind of violence.

  41. 41
    KellyK says:

    And while having your inbox and Twitter feed fill up with “you suck” is a PITA, I don’t see it as anything that justifies encroaching on the First Amendment.

    I may have missed something. Where was encroaching on the First Amendment suggested? The First Amendment doesn’t guarantee you a forum, or access to a specific audience. If Twitter decides that someone posting 100 “You suck” replies to everything another user says is harassment and against their terms of use, they can do that. And if people who are being harassed want to block emails, block people on Twitter, or otherwise refuse those communications, they have every right to do so. They also have the right to ask Twitter and Facebook to provide better ways of dealing with that harassment.

    I also think that harassment can be in the quantity of messages too, not just the content. If someone emails me once to tell me that my latest blog post was stupid crap and I don’t know what I’m taking about, that’s just speech. But if they email me *daily* to send the same message, and get a hundred other people to do the same thing on a daily basis, now they’re interfering with my ability to actually use my email account. Now, I have to spend an hour deleting and blocking and deleting some more before I even see the emails from my bank and my parents and the organizations I volunteer with.

    I think we still have a perception that anything that happens online isn’t quite real, and it would be much more obvious that this behavior is harassment if it were done using old-school methods. If, instead of replying to tweets, the harassers called Sarkeesian and Quinn on the phone multiple times a day, or showed up at their homes or businesses, that would be harassment, wouldn’t it? Why does the medium change it?

  42. 42
    desipis says:

    Where was encroaching on the First Amendment suggested?

    While lacking any sort of specific detail, Sarkeesian did mention laws as a possible solution to the “you suck” problem.

  43. 43
    Ampersand says:

    While lacking any sort of specific detail, Sarkeesian did mention laws as a possible solution to the “you suck” problem.

    It’s not clear to me that she did. Can you provide the specific quote, please?

  44. 44
    Navin Kumar says:

    … incidentally, so reasonable that it’s almost banal.

    Is it? If Sarkeesian were just some person using the internet, maybe. I’d like to see social norms that prevent what happened to (say) Justine Sacco from happening to anyone else. But Sarkeesian is – by her own fashioning, anyway – a public intellectual, someone who openly engages in ideas. Public intellectuals are fair game for being told that they suck, day in day out. Social norms – the ones that tell people not to harass others – should not shield people who have agreed to take on this role from this particular consequence. I don’t doubt it feels bad, perhaps worse than a punch on the nose, but this is not a bad feeling we should ameliorate.

  45. 45
    Ampersand says:

    The concept of describing being the subject of insulting or hostile tweets, e-mails, etc. as “Cyberviolence” is absurd. It’s not violence.

    Would you say the phrase “emotional violence” claims that emotional violence and physical violence are the same thing?

    In English, it’s normal usage to form new phrases and nouns out of already-existing nouns. If we didn’t do this, we’d have a much less flexible and useful language.

    “Cyber violence” is not the same as “violence,” because it has the modifier “cyber” attached.

    In other news: “hot dogs” are not actually made of dogs. An “air guitar” is not an actual guitar. The “fat cat” CEO may be neither fat nor cat. Etc, etc.

    So I don’t think I buy your claim that the term “cyber violence” is inherently dishonest or inaccurate.

    I’d have more sympathy for the claim that it’s hyperbolic in a way that is not helpful. On the other hand, reading through some of the comments Sarkeesian gets, the term “cyber violence” actually doesn’t seem all that hyperbolic to me.

  46. 47
    Pete Patriot says:

    Would you say the phrase “emotional violence” claims that emotional violence and physical violence are the same thing?…

    “Cyber violence” is not the same as “violence,” because it has the modifier “cyber” attached.

    It implies it is a subset of violence, in the way cyber terrorism is a subset of terrorism. While you can shut down a power station using the internet, it’s hard to see how sending a message is violence.

  47. 48
    Pete Patriot says:

    If, instead of replying to tweets, the harassers called Sarkeesian and Quinn on the phone multiple times a day, or showed up at their homes or businesses, that would be harassment, wouldn’t it? Why does the medium change it?

    A reply is just a tweet that begins with @username. These are publicly hosted on twitter, and are also collected and appear in a users notifications tab. Unlike a phoneline or a home Sark doesn’t own twitter. The reason she’s ‘harrassed’ is she elects to read public messages which she objects to. Sark is basically saying people should be banned from using her name on a public blogging platform.

  48. 49
    veronica d says:

    The assertion is that the psychological damage from this kind of abuse is comparable to some forms of violence, which is sufficient to justify the use of the word.

    You might disagree with that. However, language grows and changes to fit the needs of speakers, and while these changes are often areas of dispute, that is not the same as saying anyone is acting in bad faith.

    For myself, I think it is worth understanding both sides of the issue, and furthermore having a willingness to set aside the issue of semantics and focus on the actual facts. Take an honest look at the scale of harassment unleashed on Sarkeesian, Quinn, Wu, and others, and tell me what you think of it. What words are strong enough to express your feelings.

    Personally I don’t use “violence” this way, but I understand why some people do. Furthermore, I’m more concerned about things that are bad enough that they think they need that word than I am about fighting over words.

  49. 50
    veronica d says:

    @pete — Can you extend this logic to other kinds of harassment on other platforms? How is your phone number different? Your home address? How is it different face-to-face? I mean, imagine if riding the subway meant getting harassed and abused by ten different people, every day with no hope for change.

    No prob. Just don’t ride the subway. Just don’t open mail. Don’t answer your phone.

    Anyway, yes Twitter is different, but largely because it is new. No one denies that social media has a major role in our world. I use it more than my phone.

    “By using Twitter you agree to any level of rampant sexist abuse” is probably not a winning position. If your position is “Just suck it up or leave,” the people listening to you might conclude that you are the sort of person who, in general, says “just suck it up or leave.”

    They may decide that is a terrible approach and work to change things.

    If you don’t like their changes… well you have your own mantra to help you deal.

  50. 51
    RonF says:

    I don’t know if Sarkeesian was proposing such, but the U.N. document sure looks like it.

  51. 52
    LTL FTC says:

    RonF:

    I don’t know if Sarkeesian was proposing such, but the U.N. document sure looks like it.

    You can never be sure, as at least one of the citations was to someone’s C: drive.

    Sometimes I think that the Internet’s only hope is that its enemies aren’t very good at using it. I say that as someone who has been to several countries that attempt to block websites.

  52. 53
    closetpuritan says:

    Navin Kumar:
    Social norms – the ones that tell people not to harass others – should not shield people who have agreed to take on this role from this particular consequence.

    This sounds dangerously close to “celebrities have zero right to privacy, because their job as celebrities is to be known about* and therefore they can’t complain about any horribly invasive means people use to try to uncover personal information or images”.

    *not to perform in a TV show, concerts, etc.

    I don’t think that “you suck” is actually an exchange of ideas, so I’m not sure why we should consider it part of the “job” of a public intellectual. I don’t think it would be bad if Twitter decided not to host content-free insults–though I’m not sure if there’s a feasible way to implement that, and I’m certainly not suggesting that it should be illegal.

    ***
    I’m not actually convinced that we have evidence that Sarkeesian’s view is that being told “you suck” is cyber violence. Based on the quotes and comments here, “cyber violence” was in the question, but she doesn’t use it in the disputed paragraph, so it’s not her preferred descriptor for the stuff she’s talking about there, because if it was her preferred descriptor that’s what she would have used–I read her response as more “These things that are cyber violence are on the higher end of the spectrum of harassment. Being told “you suck” zillions of times is on the lower end of the spectrum, but they are both on the spectrum of harassment. Being told “you suck” zillions of times is related to the issue of cyber violence because they are both on the spectrum of harassment.”

  53. 55
    desipis says:

    Ampersand:

    It’s not clear to me that she did. Can you provide the specific quote, please?

    Since I haven’t been able to find it elsewhere, I wrote a full transcript of Sarkeesian’s statement:

    Feminist frequency is a non profit that looks at the way women are represented in the media. And by doing this work I have been the target for three years non-stop of egregious online harassment in all levels

    I think it’s important to recognise that harassment is, as someone has mentioned, is not just what is legal and illegal right? Harassment is threats of violence but it’s also the day to day grind of “you’re a liar”, “you suck”, you know making all of these hate videos to attack us on a regular basis and the mobs that come from those hate videos, etc.

    And so, you know, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about online harassment and what we can do about it, and I think something that’s really important to understand is that, you know, we know this but I think it’s worth saying that, sexism and misogyny did not start with the internet. Right? It’s been around for a long time. And feminists for decades have been challenging these male dominated systems.

    So what we’re seeing is that the internet is providing new ways to commit the same types of violence. Right and so understanding that this is a cultural… we really need to see a big cultural shift in how we deal with this, and we can take note from, activists that have been doing this work previously and have continued to do this work, while acknowledging how technology is changing the face of current day sexism and misogyny.

    So, creating a cultural shift, I think, takes a number, a great number of approaches and we’ve been hearing a lot about systemic change and that makes me really happy, because I think that’s really how we have to do this.

    So one of those approaches is that the online social media sites and the places in which we are engaging on these large platforms really need to step up and change the way that their systems operate. So it’s not enough that they simply put band-aids on the problem areas, they need to completely reimagine what their systems look like, in order to build sites that actively deter online harassment, that make it harder to do this.

    We’re not gonna go and convince every single person who does horrible things online to stop doing those things. But we can make systems that actively deter that kind of behaviour, which would make a huge impact on the lives me and so many other people who are being harassed online.

    So what we have right now, is um, women are forced to build a fortress around themselves with the measly tools that we have online. Um, and so we’re being punished for people harassing us, and, you know… yes period.

    I think that’s a really big problem and so we need to really think about how we create this larger cultural shift taking into consideration society at large, taking into consideration tech platforms, taking into consideration laws. So that people, like all people, can engage online and fully participate without fear of intimidation and violence.

    If I were to summarise I would see the three main points as:
    * Harassment is threats + “you suck”;
    * Solving the harassment problem requires cultural change;
    * Effecting that cultural change means changing social norms, tech platforms and laws.

    You might argue that she only meant changing laws in regards to threats of violence and not “you suck” type comments. However, given she’s already acknowledged that some types of harassment are already illegal, it’s not clear why she’d say we need to consider laws as part of the solution if she wasn’t intending that the laws be expanded to cover all the types of harassment she defines.

  54. 56
    desipis says:

    Ampersand:

    Would you say the phrase “emotional violence” claims that emotional violence and physical violence are the same thing?

    I was thinking on that phrase “emotional violence”. Imagine you strongly identify as part of a subculture, and there is a continual stream of negative commentary directed towards your subculture and effectively your identity. You’re repeatedly told that you’re sexist and misogynist; that your subculture is turning you into a violent thug or an evil Satan worshiper; you’re repeatedly told the things you value and find interesting lack intellectual merit, that you don’t understand your own interests and that they are just appealing to the base human desires. Imagine these negative messages are coming from the mainstream media, the specialist media that focuses on your subculture and from numerous members within the community. Would this be “emotional violence”?

    Perhaps “cultural violence” would be a better term to describe the work of people like Sarkeesian?

  55. 57
    Harlequin says:

    desipis:

    Imagine you strongly identify as part of a subculture, and there is a continual stream of negative commentary directed towards your subculture and effectively your identity. You’re repeatedly told that you’re sexist and misogynist; that your subculture is turning you into a violent thug or an evil Satan worshiper; you’re repeatedly told the things you value and find interesting lack intellectual merit, that you don’t understand your own interests and that they are just appealing to the base human desires. […] Perhaps “cultural violence” would be a better term to describe the work of people like Sarkeesian?

    I ask this seriously: have you watched any of Sarkeesian’s work on video games? It does not do any of those things. If anything, it’s the opposite: it treats video games as works of art deserving serious criticism (in the art-criticism definition, not the you-did-stuff-wrong criticism definition).

    There are definitely people who say video games have bad effects [edit: such as making people more violent], that they are low art if they’re art at all, etc. Sarkeesian is not one of those people.

    Also:

    However, given she’s already acknowledged that some types of harassment are already illegal, it’s not clear why she’d say we need to consider laws as part of the solution if she wasn’t intending that the laws be expanded to cover all the types of harassment she defines.

    That is one heck of a slippery slope argument.

  56. 58
    veronica d says:

    @desipis — That’s a fair point, and basically what Scott Alexander talked about in his “super weapons” essay. In any case, I understand your feeling. The point is, however, the attacks on Sarkeesian began for no reason except the fact she began a kickstarter to produce some feminist critiques of video games. That’s it. Everything else came later.

    Given all that has unfolded, the criticisms made by feminists about “nerd culture” are sadly correct, but only when applied to elements of nerd culture. This is a tricky thing to talk about, and it’s easy to make mistakes.

    But then, those who lash out at “feminism” or “SJWs” make the same mistake, and those who attack Sarkeesian based on things said and done by people who are not Sarkeesian make the same mistake.

    It seems like a pretty common mistake. But “the redpill” is a real thing, and -chan culture is very much active, and “creepshots” and “upskirts” abound, along with a pretty broad range of men who think such stuff is okay. Along with all of this is a constant refrain from men: if women get their feelings hurt, it’s the fault of women for having feelings that get hurt.

    I remember men who said outright that “the fappening” was totally fine because “those women would never sleep with me anyhow.” This attitude is shockingly commonplace.

    During the height of gamergate, I recall men who said it’s okay to bully women, because pretty women only like jocks, and so pretty women bring jocks to nerd-space, and thus nerds need to defend themselves.

    On and on. This is the backdrop of angry men who blame women, and the degree these attitudes have penetrated nerd culture, and the risk of the “lone male gunmen” — and let us note today’s killings in Oregon. Thus when Sarkeesian talks about the violent threats against her, this is the substance of her fear.

    There is a profound undercurrent of violence and misogyny in nerd-space, and this is an enormous problem for women to negotiate. This is true even if “SJWs” also make errors.

    I understand your dislike of feminist super weapons. As a woman, I dislike the fact that those who preach these super weapons seem to have a point.

  57. 59
    desipis says:

    veronica d:

    “By using Twitter you agree to any level of rampant sexist abuse” is probably not a winning position. If your position is “Just suck it up or leave,” the people listening to you might conclude that you are the sort of person who, in general, says “just suck it up or leave.”

    They may decide that is a terrible approach and work to change things.

    The problem I see with the approach of criticising the “Just suck it up or leave” position is that its effectively an “everybody else has to do things the way I want them to be done” position. Twitter is designed to be a simple, publicly accessible, broadcast medium. That’s the reason behind its success. Some critics seem to on one hand appreciate the value of such as system, while at the same time want to completely undermine the elements that lead to its success and value, because they don’t like some of the side effects.

    Take Facebook as an example. From what I’ve seen they tend to have stronger restrictions on the material they’ll permit to be posted to their network. Yet if you look at the way the controversy of photos of breast feeding, the same groups of people (i.e. feminists) who want restrictions on things they find offensive (e.g. gendered insults) complain when things other people find offensive (e.g. uncovered breasts) are similarly restricted.

    There seems to be a strong cultural authoritarian theme, where feminists are pushing for social networks that currently cater to the diverse range of cultures around the world to be structured in a way that suits (western) feminist values and dismisses the wide range of values of other groups.

  58. 60
    desipis says:

    veronica d:

    The point is, however, the attacks on Sarkeesian began for no reason except the fact she began a kickstarter to produce some feminist critiques of video games.

    If you step back a bit, I think you can describe it as that Sarkeesian launched a attack on a subculture using her style of rhetoric and that many people from that subculture responded with attacks using a style of rhetoric common to that subculture.

    There is a profound undercurrent of violence and misogyny in nerd-space

    I can understand how given the prominance that Sarkeesian has achieved she’d be concerned that at least one of her detractors are actually some sort of violent psycho. However, I’m not sure how you go from that to conflating a few bad examples with an “undercurrent of violence and misogyny in nerd-space”.

    The “bad generalisation” is a criticism that is directed at Sarkeesian as well. There’s a tweet in that “one week of harassment” list that reads:

    @femfreq Why ruin people’s gaming experience when you should keep your nose in your own business? Clearly you need to be educated. @KEEMSTARx

    How is that “harrassment”? What about this one:

    @femfreq I was going to try and explain in 140 characters why your femi-nazi shit is a waste of time but I have more important things to do.

    Or this one (it’s not even directed at Sarkeesian, it’s merely about her):

    Why can’t I shake the feeling that @femfreq is picking Twitter handles out of a hat and shooping together threat screenshots?

    Or this:

    @femfreq you are setting the women’s movement back with every word you say. Quit being an attention whore, no one made you a rep for women.

    Conflating criticism like the above, with legitimate death threats, under the banner of “harassment” or “violence” or “misogyny” is not going to help solve any problems.

  59. 61
    Navin Kumar says:

    @ampersand – None of those are in the vicinity of “you suck” or “you’re a liar” which is what she was complaining about, and which are valid responses to someone’s output.

    We don’t think racist, sexist, homophobic, what-have-you insults are okay, even (especially?) when directed at public figures. But we do expect them to put up with generic insults, like “you suck”.

    I’d like for norms to protect non-public intellectuals from even “you suck” and “you’re a liar” dogpiles; public intellectuals? No.

    @closetpuritan

    This sounds dangerously close to “celebrities have zero right to privacy, because their job as celebrities is to be known about* and therefore they can’t complain about any horribly invasive means people use to try to uncover personal information or images”.

    Nonsense. We don’t think you should be able to stalk celebrities or take photos of them in their bedrooms (without their consent) or whatever.

    We do think that you should be able to call a celebrity a liar, or tell them that their performance sucks. Making claims publicly opens you up being called a liar. Performing publicly opens you up to being told you suck at your job. People have been Carly Florina a liar – is that harassment that must end?

    Conflating these two categorically different sets of things is exactly what people are deriding Sarkeesian for.

    Also, good luck codifying “content-free” -ness into a policy. I’ve seen people use “racist” in a knee-jerk, content-free manner; that doesn’t mean the word ceases to have meaning.

  60. 62
    Sebastian H says:

    So under this definition I assume we are to understand that Adria Richards incited violence?

  61. 63
    veronica d says:

    Twitter is experiencing a problem of scale. A platform that works well with a moderate number of users can become impractical with a large number. This is no surprise. It’s a pretty basic application of network effects.

    Social networks are new, and we have not yet worked out how to make them work. Plus, given that new platforms emerge with new specifics, we can’t always predict what sort of environment they will create. For example, the “retweet” feature probably seemed cute when it was created. However, it is the cause of many “Twitter rage pile-ons” that have ruined careers. Who would have predicted that?

    The person who first added “screenshots” to computer operating systems — did they foresee what they would become when combined with social networks?

    All the advocates of Internet anonymity — they were aware of what anonymity did on Usenet. Could they have predicted what 4chan would become?

    The are complicated issues, and people will look at a broad range of solutions, both market based and regulatory. However, people will not broadly accept a lawless free-for-all where social network spaces are dominated by those most willing to deliberately offend, not to mention those most willing to threaten real-world violence.

    I mean, “swatting” is an actual thing. Just take a deep breath and think about that.

    Furthermore, those who advocate “just ignore it” do not seem to realize that the attackers will escalate until the become impossible to ignore. Have you read the gamergate IRC logs and seen how far they were willing to go?

    If you want to point out that much of that is already illegal, well yes it is. However, law enforcement may need additional regulatory tools to enforce these laws.

    And these laws damn well need to be enforced.

    I’ve notice that often the very same people who object to government regulation also object to any degree of commercial self-regulation. You can find these people any time Reddit changes some policy. In other words, they advocate for the lawless free-for-all.

    That won’t work.

  62. 64
    Duncan says:

    Navin Kumar: “None of those are in the vicinity of ‘you suck’ or ‘you’re a liar’ which is what she was complaining about, and which are valid responses to someone’s output.”

    Well, no, those aren’t valid responses.

    You go on to say that “We don’t think racist, sexist, homophobic, what-have-you insults are okay”, whoever “we” are; but “you suck” is homophobic and misogynist, not “generic,” and it doesn’t seem to bother you. Like “fuck you,” “suck” is so engrained in boy culture that people forget what it means. Homophobic, misogynist and racist insults are common coin in what desipis called the gamer “subculture.” Maybe you really think you don’t think bigoted insults okay, but that remark really looks like a diversionary move to me.

    But my main point here is that “You suck” is not a valid response to someone saying something you dislike or disagree with. If anything, it amounts to a confession that you have nothing valid to say in response to them. It doesn’t show your rationality, your finely-honed debating skills, your superior knowledge about gaming or any other subject. It shows that you’re a stupid, inarticulate lump who has nothing of any interest or value to say about the subject about which you’ve gotten all hot and bothered. The beauty of the internet, of course, as of free speech in general, is that no one has to be intelligent, or knowledgeable, or rational to share their opinions with the world. But no one is required to pretend that the equivalent of monkeys throwing feces is intelligent discourse. Yet I’ve noticed (right here in these comments, as well as in many other places) that these shit-throwing boys not only want to be taken for rational thinkers, but want respect and sympathy for themselves. And another thing about “subculture”: it’s one thing (though not above criticism and censure) to engage in these antics among themselves, and quite another to direct them against those who didn’t ask, and don’t want to play. The funny thing is that the people who are here (and elsewhere) defending the monkeys are thereby confirming everything derogatory anyone could say about boy-culture and gamer culture in particular.

  63. 65
    Ruchama says:

    I think the scale is probably a large part of it. Not the same thing, but it reminds me a bit of what happened with GISHWHES last year. (GISHWHES is the Greatest International Scavenger Hunt the World Has Ever Seen, and it’s run by Misha Collins, an actor from Supernatural.) Last year, one of the items on the list was to get a published sci-fi/fantasy author to write a 140-word story featuring Misha and the Queen of England, or something like that. A whole lot of teams came to the same idea for that one — Neil Gaiman is on Twitter all the time, so let’s ask him! So, lots of people asked him. He said no to all of them. Some small percentage replied to his refusal pretty rudely. And, throughout the course of the week, more teams kept getting the “Let’s ask Gaiman!” idea, so he was getting more and more of these requests even as he was dealing with the couple of jerks who wouldn’t take no for an answer. He eventually published this whole rant about the whole thing. But, really, the issue was the volume a lot more than the couple of jerks. There were thousands of teams competing, and Gaiman was probably the first name that came to mind for most people who read that item. Even if every single person had been polite, all those requests probably added a couple hours to the amount of time he had to spend going through all his Twitter messages to find the things he actually wanted to respond to. And the requests kept coming in, until he got fed up and started ranting about it.

    (This year, they seemed to have mostly learned their lesson in terms of items like that. Most of the items that required getting a famous person to do something required actors, and anyone who’s played before knows that Orlando Jones, Mark Sheppard, John Barrowman, and a couple of others will play along with just about anything. William Shatner will generally act like a grumpy old man about the whole thing, but if you ask him to do something relatively easy like retweet something with a particular hashtag, he will. “Let’s go annoy Shatner” has become a GISHWHES tradition, too, and he goes along with it.)

  64. 66
    Sarah says:

    @desipis

    You might argue that she only meant changing laws in regards to threats of violence and not “you suck” type comments. However, given she’s already acknowledged that some types of harassment are already illegal, it’s not clear why she’d say we need to consider laws as part of the solution if she wasn’t intending that the laws be expanded to cover all the types of harassment she defines.

    This seems to be jumping to conclusions to me. There aren’t only two possibilities, where Sarkeesian meant either (1) “laws will not need to change because some kinds of harassment are already illegal” or (2) “laws will need to change, and specifically to cover the things I mentioned in this same speech, because they’re not already illegal.” If those were the only two views she could hold about how laws should change re: harrassment, your argument that she most likely meant the latter would be reasonable. But there are many other views that Sarkeesian could hold about the role of lawmaking in the kind of cultural shift she’s talking about that would lead her to mention it the way she did in her speech.

    Since I would describe this as a “vague, passing mention,” my money is on the most likely interpretation being something along the lines of, “I’m not sure how changes to the law would need to come into play to best serve the cultural shift I’d like to see, but I have a strong suspicion that some degree of change will be necessary, because most major changes in culture don’t entirely exclude the legal realm. So I’ll mention laws here, as well as other salient aspects of the issue at hand such as society at large and tech platforms, because ideally these would all be tools available to us to use to reduce harrassment. Otherwise, I make no claims at this time about which laws should be changed or whether those changes should include criminalization specifically.”

    I’m probably biased because that’s what I would be saying in this case, but I also think that that’s what most people would say in this case. I think opponents of social activism see a lot of calls for criminalization of behaviors where they don’t exist. Mentioning that laws could be changed as a tool for social change does not constitute advocating for any specific change in that moment, and criminalization is only one of the ways laws can change. (Some others would be incentivizing private companies like Twitter to make modifications to their websites or changing the way police are required to investigate cases of harrassment that already cross over into criminal territory, so that those investigations were more effective and served as a stronger deterrent to lesser forms of harrassment, perhaps.)

    Frankly, I would be hard-pressed to take any of Sarkeesian’s body of work as an indication that she even has a specific new law in mind when she says that. She’s generally pretty vague on the details when she talks about things like this. Which isn’t unreasonable, in itself, since it’s ridiculous to propose specific plans to fix problems if you don’t have the knowledge or experience to know what steps would be effective and avoid making the problem worse. She doesn’t have any particular knowledge or experience, so I wouldn’t expect a 10-point plan from her, any more than I would propose one myself if I were in her shoes.

  65. 67
    Vilfredo says:

    @Duncan:

    Would you ever apply this criticism to (using a group I identify with) gay activists who use intemperate, insulting language? Or do they get a pass because they never claimed superior rationality? I’m not actually a fan of people telling others “you suck” online, but I also don’t think it’s a particularly strong insult at all – consider the arguments about language changing above – and I think you’re articulating a double standard.

    @Harlequin:

    If anything, it’s the opposite: it treats video games as works of art deserving serious criticism (in the art-criticism definition, not the you-did-stuff-wrong criticism definition).

    This reminded me of a discussion I had with a friend when gamergate was still a new thing. He’s interested in indie game development, and gay, and I was surprised that he was somewhat sympathetic to gamergate. When I asked him about it, he said that he thought that Sarkeesian, Quinn, Leigh Alexander, et al. were disingenuously pushing an ideological standard for indie games in particular, one that would squeeze out not only misogynistic games, but anything that didn’t carry the right ideological message. We argued about that.

    But he also said that he didn’t like the idea of games being treated as “art,” since other things treated that way, like modern visual art or poetry, are buried by impenetrable critical language and totally inaccessible to most people. And I found myself agreeing, to an extent. I don’t think games should be immune from artistic criticism, but critical language can be deployed in a way that lets the critic take control of the medium, excluding those who don’t have the background to engage with it (I think this is most true of Leigh Alexander here).

    [fwiw, I’m not a fan of Sarkeesian because I think she’s a gender essentialist, since she argues that a truly feminist game protagonist cannot engage in violent conflict, because that’s necessarily masculine. That and I think her analysis is just pretty shallow in places.]

  66. 68
    Ruchama says:

    But he also said that he didn’t like the idea of games being treated as “art,” since other things treated that way, like modern visual art or poetry, are buried by impenetrable critical language and totally inaccessible to most people.

    But neither of those things have really been mass media in modern times. I’d think a better comparison would be movies or TV shows — there’s plenty of academic and critical discourse on both, but neither have been made inaccessible by it.

  67. 69
    desipis says:

    Duncan:

    The funny thing is that the people who are here (and elsewhere) defending the monkeys are thereby confirming everything derogatory anyone could say about boy-culture and gamer culture in particular.

    Before the sentence above I thought your comment was just a bit snobbish, but that comes across as rather misandrist.

    But let’s just change a few things in your comment as see how it sounds:

    But my main point here is that putting tape over your mouth is not a valid response to someone saying something you dislike or disagree with. If anything, it amounts to a confession that you have nothing valid to say in response to them. It doesn’t show your rationality, your finely-honed debating skills, your superior knowledge about gaming or any other subject. It shows that you’re a stupid, inarticulate lump who has nothing of any interest or value to say about the subject about which you’ve gotten all hot and bothered. The beauty of liberal college campuses, of course, as of free speech in general, is that no one has to be intelligent, or knowledgeable, or rational to share their opinions with the world. But no one is required to pretend that the equivalent of monkeys throwing feces is intelligent discourse. Yet I’ve noticed (right here in these comments, as well as in many other places) that these shit-throwing girls not only want to be taken for rational thinkers, but want respect and sympathy for themselves. And another thing about “subculture”: it’s one thing (though not above criticism and censure) to engage in these antics among themselves, and quite another to direct them against those who didn’t ask, and don’t want to play. The funny thing is that the people who are here (and elsewhere) defending the monkeys are thereby confirming everything derogatory anyone could say about girl-culture and feminism in particular.

    (I’m referencing this, in case anyone missed it)

  68. 70
    Ampersand says:

    I’m not a fan of Sarkeesian because I think she’s a gender essentialist, since she argues that a truly feminist game protagonist cannot engage in violent conflict, because that’s necessarily masculine.

    I’m skeptical. Could you please provide a quote of Sarkeesian saying this, along with a link to where she said it?

  69. 71
    desipis says:

    veronica d:

    However, it is the cause of many “Twitter rage pile-ons” that have ruined careers. Who would have predicted that?

    The person who first added “screenshots” to computer operating systems — did they foresee what they would become when combined with social networks?

    All the advocates of Internet anonymity — they were aware of what anonymity did on Usenet. Could they have predicted what 4chan would become?

    And what unpredicted consequences are there going to be from a large scale attempt to regulate and control the culture of the internet?

    However, people will not broadly accept a lawless free-for-all where social network spaces are dominated by those most willing to deliberately offend

    I’ve notice that often the very same people who object to government regulation also object to any degree of commercial self-regulation. You can find these people any time Reddit changes some policy. In other words, they advocate for the lawless free-for-all.

    I think Reddit is a great example. There are many sub-reddits where there are very strong self-regulation on what can be said, while others are more free. I don’t think anyone was protesting providing the people running the many communities on reddit with more power to manage their own communities. What was being protested, were attempts to create a one-size-fits-all approach to community management, where one particular standard would be forced on everyone. I think the same criticism could be levelled at any attempt to legislate standards for social media platforms.

    There’s also the issues around any implementation. I mean, how many hours a year does Barry want to spend making sure that amptoons.com remains in compliance with federal regulations on social media sites?

    I mean, “swatting” is an actual thing. Just take a deep breath and think about that.

    “Swatting” is about the only thing that can be clearly labelled as “cyber violence”. Dealing with the issue requires a focus on appropriate managing communication interfaces with emergency services and subsequent investigation and prosecutions. It doesn’t require regulating social media, nor would such regulation even help.

  70. 72
    desipis says:

    Speaking of unpredicted consequences of attempting to create tech platforms to manage people. I think this point is salient:

    Except of course it took the rest of the world about two seconds to figure out that filtering the world to only include those with positive feelings was not exactly realistic, and all the app was likely to do was invite an endless stream of abuse, bullying, and stalking.

  71. 73
    closetpuritan says:

    Navin Kumar:
    Nonsense. We don’t think you should be able to stalk celebrities or take photos of them in their bedrooms (without their consent) or whatever.

    We? Who’s we? A lot of people seem to think otherwise.

    We do think that you should be able to call a celebrity a liar, or tell them that their performance sucks. Making claims publicly opens you up being called a liar. Performing publicly opens you up to being told you suck at your job. People have been Carly Florina a liar – is that harassment that must end?

    If people are sending a bunch of messages to her that just say “you’re a liar”, yes, those people should stop doing that. People should feel free to write articles/post on FaceBook/etc that she’s a liar, preferably with some actual content, and they should feel free to do the same WRT Sarkeesian.

    Conflating these two categorically different sets of things is exactly what people are deriding Sarkeesian for.

    I assume that you mean people are deriding Sarkeesian for conflating a different categorically different sets of things , not these two categorically different sets of things… Anyway, you don’t make an argument that they’re categorically different, you merely assert it. Obviously they are different things, but I think the similarities are meaningful and the differences are not. They’re both examples of people arbitrarily deciding that because certain things often are encountered by people with a particular job category, they should be something that those people are expected to put up with, even though we would think that people subjecting other people NOT in that job category to that kind of stuff were being jerks–and even though putting up with that stuff is not part of them accomplishing their job.

    Also, good luck codifying “content-free” -ness into a policy. I’ve seen people use “racist” in a knee-jerk, content-free manner; that doesn’t mean the word ceases to have meaning.

    This seems excessive, given that in the comment you’re responding to, I said myself that it would be difficult if not impossible to implement.

    “Racist”, by itself, is indeed pretty content free, though. I don’t see much value in Twitter facilitating people who just want to repeatedly tweet “racist!” or “you’re a racist!” to someone, whether or not they’re actually just done something racist.

    Duncan:
    But my main point here is that “You suck” is not a valid response to someone saying something you dislike or disagree with. If anything, it amounts to a confession that you have nothing valid to say in response to them. It doesn’t show your rationality, your finely-honed debating skills, your superior knowledge about gaming or any other subject.

    Exactly–why people think being a public intellectual means that it’s important and relevant to their ‘job’ that the public intellectual themselves read “you suck”-type comments is beyond me.

    Veronica D:
    Twitter is experiencing a problem of scale. A platform that works well with a moderate number of users can become impractical with a large number. This is no surprise. It’s a pretty basic application of network effects.

    Social networks are new, and we have not yet worked out how to make them work. Plus, given that new platforms emerge with new specifics, we can’t always predict what sort of environment they will create. For example, the “retweet” feature probably seemed cute when it was created. However, it is the cause of many “Twitter rage pile-ons” that have ruined careers. Who would have predicted that?

    This is a great explanation for why Twitter seems so terrible (from the outside, as a non-Twitter-user), and why what seems like bad design to me [it’s hard to talk about people without basically sending them tweets? random strangers sea-lion into your conversations?] would have made sense at the time.

    I think Ruchama’s and Grace’s point about scale is important. I think one point that I kind of alluded to in my response to Navin is also important–there’s a difference between sending messages to someone and talking about someone. (Twitter seems to make it hard to talk about someone without sending messages to them.) One makes it a lot harder to go on about your daily life than the other. This is related to how, I think, one free speech value that can at times interfere with other ‘facilitate free speech’ goals is the right to choose not to listen to someone. If they’re metaphorically following you around with a megaphone that seems like a violation of your own freedom.

  72. 74
    Ampersand says:

    (Twitter seems to make it hard to talk about someone without sending messages to them.)

    This is a minor point, but it’s very easy on Twitter to talk about someone without sending messages to them. You just say “Barry Deutsch is very handsome,” rather than saying “@barrydeutsch is very handsome.”

  73. 75
    Harlequin says:

    But he also said that he didn’t like the idea of games being treated as “art,” since other things treated that way, like modern visual art or poetry, are buried by impenetrable critical language and totally inaccessible to most people.

    To add to what Ruchama said: a whole industry of rock music criticism hasn’t killed rock music; it may have created a subgenre of rock music that’s only popular with certain kinds of music snobs, but the genre as a whole is still quite popular. (People praising, I don’t know, Arcade Fire didn’t stop Nickelback from selling a ton of albums.) If the media’s vibrant, both small critically-acclaimed artists and popular critically-lambasted artists can have successful careers.

    It’s fine if you, personally, don’t care about criticism like that, or don’t find it useful, or want to ignore it entirely; I think it’s incorrect to believe it damages the medium, however.

  74. 76
    Vilfredo says:

    @Amp,

    She articulated this in her segment on True Grit. The particular quote is:

    This maybe one of the reasons why people are quick to adopt Mattie as a feminist character and other female pop culture characters who are considered strong and tough. The feminism I subscribe to and work for involves more then women and our fictional representations simply acting like men or unquestioningly replicating archetypal male values such being emotionally inexpressive, the need for domination and competition, and the using violence as a form of conflict resolution.

    In my feminist vision, part of what makes a character feminist is watching her struggle with prioritizing values such as cooperation, empathy, compassion, and non violent conflict resolution in a world largely hostile to those values.

    [link is here]

    She says “feminist” and not “female,” but I think it’s safe to say that’s the only kind of female character Sarkeesian thinks is worth having in media. The implication I get there is that the only reason a woman would be violent is conditioning by a male-dominated society. I’m not sure how else to describe that but essentialist.

    @Ruchama and Harlequin,

    The thing is that games are already very fragmented in terms of audience. There’s an entire realm of indie games that don’t really overlap at all with the AAA designers, for instance – that’s the realm where Zoe Quinn made her name, for example.

    Now, the indie game scene has exploded since it has become easier to make a game, but it’s also the only avenue that most aspiring game designers have – the chance of getting picked up by a large studio is relatively small. So if indie games are your only real shot at publishing something, I can understand being worried that a particular critical position is coming to dominate the scene.

  75. 77
    Ampersand says:

    She says “feminist” and not “female,” but I think it’s safe to say that’s the only kind of female character Sarkeesian thinks is worth having in media.

    No, that’s an amazing and completely unjustified leap of logic, not something that is “safe to say.”

    The implication I get there is that the only reason a woman would be violent is conditioning by a male-dominated society. I’m not sure how else to describe that but essentialist.

    Sarkeesian’s quote in no reasonable way implies what you claims it implies.

    (Also, you’ve moved the goalposts. You originally said:

    I’m not a fan of Sarkeesian because I think she’s a gender essentialist, since she argues that a truly feminist game protagonist cannot engage in violent conflict, because that’s necessarily masculine.

    Unsurprisingly, Sarkeesian has praised female characters who “engage in violent conflict,” such as Buffy from BTVS and Jake from Beyond Good and Evil).

  76. 78
    Ampersand says:

    Having just read your supporting quote in context (and sincere thanks for providing the link), your case becomes even more threadbare. Your entire argument is based on the assumption that it is “safe to say” that Sarkeesian conflates “feminist” and “female”:

    She says “feminist” and not “female,” but I think it’s safe to say that’s the only kind of female character Sarkeesian thinks is worth having in media.

    But in the essay you link to, Sarkeesian unambiguously distinguishes between these two things, saying that Mattie Ross is “witty and smart… daring, self reliant, and independent” and “a breath of fresh air” for female characters. But she argues that although “Mattie possesses a number of admirable traits rarely seen in female movie roles, I’m just not convinced that she’s a feminist character.”

    It’s a real stretch, reading the review, to say that Sarkeesian doesn’t think Mattie Ross is a “kind of female character… worth having in media.” Sarkeesian clearly thinks that Mattie Ross IS worth having (“a breath of fresh air”), but argues that she’s not a feminist character.

    (I don’t entirely agree with Sarkeesian’s take, btw, but that’s outside the scope of this comment.)

  77. 79
    Ampersand says:

    Desipis:

    (I’m referencing this, in case anyone missed it)

    Eh. I don’t think it’s censorship for people to tell Sarkeesian “you suck”; I don’t think that’s what Duncan was saying, either. So the comparison to a post in which I said it’s not censorship for students at Oberlin to protest and disagree with Christina Hoff Summers, isn’t very cutting or on point.

    Christina Hoff Sommers, like Sarkeesian, receives a range of responses. Some of the responses have actual content and at least attempt to engage ideas. Some of them are just saying “you suck,” and it’s fair to characterize those responses as showing “nothing of any interest or value to say about the subject,” as Duncan might say. But that’s not the same as censorship.

    I do think that, when the scale gets large and constant enough, these “you suck!” (and worse) responses do create a chilling effect on speech. But I think that chilling effect, although bad, falls well short of being actual censorship. So I just don’t think your comparison holds water.

    By the way, it’s very clear by now that you’re unable to back up your claim that “Sarkeesian did mention laws as a possible solution to the ‘you suck’ problem.” Between you, Pesho, and Vilfredo, there seems to be a pattern of Sarkeesian’s critics criticizing outlandishly unjustified “interpretations” of what she says, rather than criticizing what she says.

    (And, frankly, as critical as I am, the three of you are a thousand times better than most of her critics that I’ve read; for instance, I really appreciate you being honest enough to transcribe and post the speech here, when doing so severely hurt the argument you were making. You are the cream of the crop of Sarkeesian critics.)

  78. 80
    desipis says:

    Ampersand,

    I don’t think it’s censorship for people to tell Sarkeesian “you suck”

    Sorry, I wasn’t getting at the censorship angle. Rather, I was comparing the minimal content speech designed to cause emotional discomfort of the “you suck” tweets with the minimal content speech designed to cause emotional discomfort of the Oberlin protests. The question is, where should we most reasonably expect people to tolerate such low content, emotionally harmful speech, from random idiots tweeting online or from the audience of an organised presentation on a college campus?

    the cream of the crop of Sarkeesian critics

    That’s one for the back cover.

  79. 81
    Duncan says:

    Vilfredo:

    Hey, I identify with gay activists too; I have been a gay activist myself, and may be one again (activist, that is; I’m still gay). And yes, I would criticize gay activists for using intemperate language, etc. In fact, I do criticize my fellow queers and our allies when they say “you suck” and “fuck you” and such things, because nothing says enlightenment and opposition to misogyny and homophobia like homophobic/misogynist language. Sometimes I tell people who say “fuck X person” that I’m glad they love Kim Davis (or Donald Trump, or whoever) and want to give her pleasure, but I don’t think that’s the message they are trying to convey. And yes, my people do like to present themselves as rational and enlightened compared to those stupid fundamentalist Bible thumpers who are fat and stupid. It’s painful to be reminded, constantly, that so many of my fellow gay people and liberals and leftists are stupid, bigoted swine. But I soldier on.

    I’m not so much concerned with “insult” or how “strong” the insult is, in this case — I think you’re missing the point about that. I’m saying that simply saying “You suck” to someone you disagree with is not a valid reponse to them. Yes, language changes, but “you suck” and “fuck you” still seem to me to convey the sense that being penetrated is debasing, and therefore throwing those words at another person effectively means to feminize and debase them. I’ve noticed some straight guys trying to argue that “faggot” isn’t really antigay, it’s a putdown of those who “bend the knee,” which is of course nonsense. And I must point out that the same excuse about changing language gets made for the kind of raving abuse that women like Sarkeezian are targeted with. They’re accused of being too sensitive, etc. One commenter on an article I saw about this actually claimed that if he’s not allowed to make death threats online, all “our” freedom will have been stripped away by the feminazis. (If death threats are outlawed, only outlaws will make death threats!)

    But leave that aside. It doesn’t really matter whether I’m right about the misogynist/homophobic punch of “You suck.” The important thing is that someone who says is declaring his or her refusal to debate rationally. He or she is expressing his or her feelings, I suppose; but they’re not interested in anyone else’s. Over the years I’ve run into numerous homophobes online who’ve tried to discredit what I say by insinuating that I must be a homosexual, or by trying to “out” me. You can’t “out” someone who’s already out, and it drives them up the wall that homophobic shaming doesn’t work on me. If someone says “You suck” to me in such a situation, I’m likely to say, “Why yes, I do. What is your point?” I’m not interested in censoring them, but I am interested in censuring them, mocking them, deriding them, and withholding respect from them. That’s not a double standard; the double standard is held by people who want to hurl abuse at other people, threaten them online, etc., but panic and whine that they’re being persecuted when someone throws the abuse back at them. If they want me to tiptoe around their tender little feelings, they need to show the same consideration to others. And as I’m afraid even this relatively reasonable thread shows, there are many men who can’t see any discussion of sexism as anything but a call to castrate them, as shown by the misreadings of Sarkeesian that Barry has to keep correcting. Just as there are many whites who can’t see any discussion of racism as anything but a call to drive The White Race into the sea. And many heterosexuals who see the legalization of same-sex civil marriage as opposed and hostile to heterosexual marriage. I can sympathize with their irrationality and the pain that drives it, but I see no reason to call it “valid.” It’s not.

    By the way, desipis: Thanks for confirming what I said.

  80. 82
    Ampersand says:

    Petition · Urge the US to arrest Ms Anita Sarkeesian and Ms Zoe Quinn for violating the Logan Act · Change.org

    Funny, anti-SJWs keep telling me that censorship is something their movement opposes. Nearly 3000 signatures so far.

  81. 83
    desipis says:

    While anti-SJWs are starting online partitions that’ll go nowhere, SJWs are busy using the more concrete steps of using law enforcement and vigilante violence to censor their opposition.

  82. 84
    Ampersand says:

    Desipis, if “the Rebel’s” report is accurate, then that’s deplorable.

    But so is trying to get people arrested because you don’t like them and they spoke out in public. It’s not an either-or choice.

  83. 85
    Harlequin says:

    They were definitely ejected–whether their characterization of the events surrounding it is accurate I don’t know. (Edit: somebody linked to me to some tweets yesterday about it from someone who was there on the Slut Walk side; they weren’t detailed but seemed to agree that they’d been kicked out.)

  84. 86
    desipis says:

    Ampersand:

    It’s not an either-or choice.

    Oh, I agree that the petition is censorious, legally ignorant and morally dubious. It would be very hypocritical for any free-speech advocate to support it.

    However, I don’t think it is indicative of the majority position of those who criticise Sarkeesian or Quinn. On the other hand, censorship seems to be much more strongly supported position within the “SJW” left.

  85. 87
    veronica d says:

    But wait! Asking someone to leave an event is not censorship. A commitment to free speech is not a commitment to entertain every jackass who wants your time or attention.

    Have you ever considered, Voltaire did not say:

    You might disagree with what I say, but I’ll fight to the death for my right to force you to listen to me.

    I mean, I don’t trust Yiannopoulos as far as I can throw him, so if all we know is that he was ejected from an event, well that is all we know. If you boot the Westboro Baptist folks from a funeral, you have not blocked their “free speech.”

    There is much confusion here. The right to speak is not the right to an audience. In particular, it is not the right to a specific audience. I don’t have to listen. I can ignore you. If it’s my event, I can ask you to leave. Nor is it the right to speak wherever and whenever you please, regardless of any social norms. I cannot interrupt a religious ceremony. I cannot waltz into the middle of a sports field during a game to deliver my seventeen page manifesto.

    Yiannopoulos is a noxious jerk. I wouldn’t suffer his presence if I had a choice. In fact, I’d kick him out also. On the other hand, I fully support his right to publish garbage on a terrible website. That is free speech.

  86. 88
    Duncan says:

    veronica d.:

    If you boot the Westboro Baptist folks from a funeral, you have not blocked their “free speech.”

    This remark seems to go along with a common misunderstanding of WBC’s conduct. People apparently have an image in their heads of the WBC protestors invading a funeral, waving their signs around, and screaming in the faces of the bereaved. In fact they were required by law to stay a thousand feet away from any event they picketed, and in fact they did so. It may be upsetting to know that a quarter-mile away, out of your sight and hearing, a bunch of bigoted yahoos are saying offensive things, and that may be why so many people create a fantasy of those yahoos getting in the faces of the bereaved: because the reality isn’t quite as ugly, quite as shocking. Compared, say, to the white racists who screamed in the faces of black students entering “their” schools. “A quarter mile from your face” doesn’t have the gut-punch of “In your face,” does it? Yes, keeping the protestors at a distance does limit and inhibit their free speech, but WBC seems not to have objected to that.

    As I remember it, WBC’s protests around the funerals of people who’d died of AIDS didn’t get nearly the pushback that going after military funerals has. I often say that the worst thing about WBC is that it enables all kinds of bigots to make themselves look more moderate by pointing out that they aren’t as bad as those crazies from WBC.

    One reason why people are able to claim plausibly that “the left” is more apt to favor censorship than the right is that right-wing and “centrist” censorship doesn’t get as much press; as in the attempts to silence WBC (to say nothing of entertaining fantasies of violent retribution against them), censorship may not even be recognized as censorship.

  87. 89
    veronica d says:

    I’m aware that the WBC folks are required to keep some distance. Myself, I do not see that as a limit on free speech, for exactly the reasons I discuss. Free speech is not the right to a captive audience. It is not the right to disrupt others. For example, park rangers can limit the activities of “street preachers” to certain areas of the park, so that members of the public can enjoy the fresh air without having to listen to a loud, ranting bigot.

    That said, the preacher gets to say what he needs to say. Likewise, anyone who wants to listen to the fool can go do so.

    In other words, you have the right of assembly, not the right to disrupt anyone else’s assembly as you see fit. The police often make counter protesters stand of opposite sides of the street. Each group gets their say. Anyone who wants to listen can. But we avoid fistfights.

    Go reread my not-Voltaire quote. Kicking an asshole out of your event is not censorship. He can write about it all he wants. Anyone who wants to read the jerk can. But he doesn’t get the in-your-face confrontation that he wanted. Too bad for him.